From computer science to agriculture is only one step
<>It depends only on the will. She wanted to live differently and she has been proving it for four years now. This is the destiny of Andrei Barbu, who settled, with his family, in the Ialomita commune of Valea Măcrișului. Here he grows vegetables and vegetables. It’s his business. Much more spectacular than it seems at first glance.
It may be strange to hear a computer man say that we must return to our roots, to humanity, because numbers, glass and concrete, in the midst of which we live, are not our right path. So I started towards Urziceni, then leaving the main road, towards Moldova, and then taking secondary roads, full of potholes, to the place where silence surrounded me completely, in the commune of Valea Măcrișului. Beautiful and symbolic name. Here, in this corner of Ialomita County. It brings a freshness to your plate. That it is precisely about food freed from the constraints of the Modene civilization that I talk to Andrei Barbu, who first specialized in computers, then left everything behind and left like this, one day, where he saw with his eyes. To a completely different world. To do agriculture.
“Health tastes like it”
<>We meet on the main street. Andrei comes with a white van. With her she carries the merchandise. A young man, he just finished college in 2007 – the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, the city where he was born. Two years, after college, as an assistant professor. There was no shortage of work in his field on the private market either. The whole future ahead, in the Capital, among concrete and computers. Until 2009 came and then he said stop. We are now following his car, to the farm. Good luck with these rains lately, because the dust on the streets has calmed down. We arrive in a large yard, among the solariums, a tractor, other machinery, a barn. Another man comes out to meet, Andrei’s father, Gheorghe Barbu, about whom I find out that he is a geologist by profession. From him Andrew took the taste of the earth, I find out afterwards. The father cultivated aromatic plants, somewhere in Oltenia, for a long time. Everywhere, here, around me, in this yard, all kinds of seedlings. Come to the barn, to talk, among bags of seeds of all kinds. And many other outbuildings. A moment of respite for Andrei, who also goes to the fields, and takes the goods to customers, and to conferences in Bucharest, where he talks about a completely different, healthy lifestyle. “Yes, health has taste!” he exclaims at one point.
He returned to the hearth of his great-grandparents
<>To see that nothing is accidental in this world! Andrei had raised some money, until 2009, from his basic job. He also took out a loan at the bank. That’s when he told his father that he wanted something else in life. “I supported him in everything he wanted to do,” the father says. But it had to be started from scratch. You do agriculture, you need land. The father and son left through Bărăgan for two months. “I went through about 20 communes. Everywhere I was asking about land. We were leaving ads behind us,” says Andrei. They also passed through the Măcriș Valley. And here is a little story – destiny makes Andrei’s father born in Calarasi. But where do you think the great-grandparents were from? “The great-grandmother from Ion Roata, and the great-grandfather from Valea Măcrișului”, says Gheorghe. Those people, however, in their lives, then, a long time ago, moved further to the Danube, to Calarasi. These villages, which I have just mentioned, Valea Măcrișului and Ion Roata, are a short distance from each other, in Ialomita. And this is what happens after so much bitterness since the relocation of the goods – the great-grandson buys land right in the Măcriș Valley. After how many ads he had placed in the communes he passed through, the first phone call he received was from his ancestors’ village. “It was the call of the earth,” exclaims Andrew’s father.
Self-taught in agriculture
<>Half a hectare of land he bought at first, then, in the same village, other land, up to the 16 hectares he owns now. Andrei talks about the degradation of the land in Bărăgan, due to intensive agriculture. He learned, as a self-taught man, about agriculture, books and the Internet serving him wonderfully. People in this village looked at it, at first, strangely. They didn’t really understand what a small guy of stature, with fine fingers, of a Bucharest, with the air of an office man, was looking for, especially when they saw him with a hoe in his hand or in the tractor cab. “The people around here are nice,” Andrei’s father continues, on the idea that, in the end, the “cohabitation” between the two worlds was done quite quickly and now works impeccably.
source: romanialibera.ro